On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 1:13 AM, Milan Kupcevic wrote: > It is widely held in the IT industry, and in technical industries in > general, that interface descriptions and definitions can not be legally > protected as that would stop development and production of compatible > replacement parts by third parties. This widely held belief could be > changed by a court decision or a new law in any given jurisdiction at > any time.
As we saw in the Oracle v Google case over the Java APIs, this widely held belief is not necessarily correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America%2C_Inc._v._Google%2C_Inc. The result of the case was that the Java APIs are copyrightable, but that Google's use of them was fair use. Unfortunately fair use is not internationally widespread and not the same everywhere it is implemented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationally -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
